Monday, August 31, 2015

Beginning in 1965, Mieko Shiomi conducted a series of nine events that she called Spatial Poems. Each began with an invitation to friends and colleagues from around the globe to respond to a simple instruction via the mail. The responses she received would then constitute the work.

The third Spatial Poem was on the subject of falling: "The phenomenon of a fall is actually a segment of a movement toward the centre of the earth. This very moment countless objects are falling. Let's take part in this centripetal event," she wrote in her invitation, "Spatial Poem No. 3 will be the record of your intentional effort to make something fall, occurring as it would, simultaneous with all the countless and incessant falling events".

Steiner, a writer, was asked to contribute a work to William Copley & Dmitri Petrov's SMS Portfolio. It was featured in the 6th and final issue of the project, alongside works by John Giorno, Bernar Venet, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Artschwager (the folder's cover) and others.

Johns in Art Galleries is available from The New Museum, here, for $50.00

Thursday, August 27, 2015

William N. Copley was an American painter, gallerist, collector, publisher and philanthropist, born on January 24, 1919. The adopted son of a newspaper magnate, Copley studied at Yale University before being drafted into the Second World War.

In 1946, his brother-in-law John Ployardt, a Canadian-born animator and narrator, introduced him to painting and Surrealism. After a night of drinking, the two decided to open a gallery and, “in the white haze of the morning after” were both “too proud to perish the thought.”

Copley sold his house, Ployardt quit his job at Disney, and they rented a bungalow at 257 North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills (now a parking lot). A brass plaque inscribed “Copley Galleries” was produced, at a cost of $250. A pet capuchin monkey was bought to serve as a gallery mascot, until it escaped. It was replaced with a cockatiel. “The bird was sweet and tame, and bird shit was easier to deal with than monkey shit,” Copley noted.

He convinced a number of artists to present their work at Copley Galleries, including René Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Joseph Cornell (his first ever gallery exhibition), Man Ray, Roberto Matta and Max Ernst. Despite the stellar line-up, sales were poor, as Los Angeles audiences had not yet warmed to Surrealism the way they had in New York. “I think I sold two pictures. I was trying to sell Cornell for $200. Just couldn't do it. So I went out of business,” Copley told Paul Cummings, in 1968.

Copley’s failure as a salesman led to his success as a collector. Having guaranteed the artists that at least ten per cent of the exhibition would sell, Copley found himself buying a number of the works for himself. For example, he purchased Man Ray’s Observatory Time: The Lovers from 1936, for $500. The eight-by-three-foot painting of red lips floating above the landscape has subsequently been called “the quintessential Surrealist painting.”

After the gallery closed, he remained friends with many of the artists, and became particularly close with Marcel Duchamp, who he was introduced to by Man Ray. “It was Duchamp and Max Ernst who really encouraged me to continue painting,” he recounted.

In 1949, Copley left his wife and children and relocated to Paris, to pursue painting full-time. He held his first solo exhibition in 1951, at age 32. National and international solo and group exhibitions followed, including a solo turn at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and contributions to documenta 5 and 7.

With his second wife, Norma Rathner, he developed the William and Norma Copley Foundation, with further money he inherited after the death of his father. The organization, of which Duchamp was a board member, offered small grants to artists and musicians. When Duchamp died in 1968, the Foundation donated his final work, L’Etant Donnes, to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where it remains today.

Copley eventually amassed one of the world's most highly regarded collections of Surrealist art, which was sold at auction in 1979. The Man Ray work purchased for $500 fetched $750,000, and the entire lot sold for $6.7 million, a record at the time, for single owner’s collection in the United States.

In the mid-sixties, Copley befriended the Surrealist and Dada painter Dmitri Petrov, then-based in Philadelphia. The pair decided to publish mail-order portfolios of work by contemporary artists out of a New York City Upper West Side loft. Inspired by Fluxus and notions of 'blurring the boundaries between art and life', they were determined to produce high-quality serial artworks which could bypass the museum and gallery system and reach buyers directly.

The plan was to produce a folder, designed by an artist, bi-monthly, which would contain works by several other artists, offered by subscription. Every artist received the same payment - $100 per submission.

Began at a time of much political unrest, the title S.M.S. (unfortunately) stands for ‘Shit Must Stop’, though mostly as an inside joke. Their publishing name, the considerably more distinguished sounding ‘The Letter Edged in Black Press Incorporated’, came from the suggestion of a lawyer. It is presumably a reference to the Country/Folk song of the same name, which has been recorded by Slim Whitman, Chet Atkins, Jim Reeves, Johnny Cash and others.

The loft production studio was reportedly lavish. It featured an open bar, a full buffet regularly replenished by the nearby Zabar's Delicatessen, and a pay-phone with complimentary dimes, housed in a cigar box. The place became a hotbed of activity. “On a given day, you never knew who would show up,” remembers Lew Syken, the project's chief designer.

The place was often packed with students, tasked with some of the more laborious production concerns, such as opening 8,000 letters sent to Copley from H.C. Westermann for portfolio No. 3, or to burn 2,000 of Lil Picard's bowties for the following issue. Copley occupied an office in the third floor loft with a view of West 80th Street and Broadway, and Petrov handled the day-to-day, often round-the-clock production schedule.

While the high-cost of producing the often intricate and elaborate works led to the closing of S.M.S. after a year, the six portfolios they produced rank among the most important Artists’-Multiples-as-Periodicals ever produced.

The covers were designed by Marcel Duchamp, Irving Petlin, John Battan, Robert Stanley, Richard Artschwager, and (possibly as a nod to Copley’s previous gallery mascot) Congo the Chimpanzee. The famous painting chimp was also included in the Fluxus Year Box 1, an early influence on S.M.S.

Although he only contributed one work to the series (a fascinating folder called The Barber's Shop), Copley presumably viewed the project as an extension of his work as an artist, personally signing each issue ‘CPLY’ (pronounced 'see ply', this was the name with which he signed his own paintings).

In total, 73 original multiples were produced for the 6 portfolios. 2000 copies of each were produced, and reportedly 1500 distributed. In 1981, Copley donated the remaining 500 sets of SMS to the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. These were presumably stored and forgotten, until a flood hit, destroying many of them.

In 1998, in collaboration with Reinhold-Brown gallery, the New Museum offered complete sets of the periodical for the first time in almost two decades. They included the original mailing case, as well as two works that were produced in 1968 but never distributed: boxed audio cassettes by minimalists Terry Riley and La Monte Young. Collectors could also elect to have the portfolios housed in new custom-made plexiglass slipcases.

Most of the information about SMS comes from a slim, 16-page black and white catalogue produced at the time, including some of the oft-told legends recounted above. S.M.S. is worthy of it's own monograph, but very little has been published about the project. It's completely omitted in Phil Aarons' In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955 and receives only brief mention in Gwen Allen's Artists' Magazines. Conversely, the similar Aspen Magazine gets a full chapter in Allen's book.

Aspen preceded S.M.S. by a couple of years, but didn't fully break away from the standard magazine format: Aspen commissioned writers to write about art, and included advertisements. Their format was less conventional than SMS (there was no standard size or approach for their box or folder) but the quality was also less consistent. The strength of the individual issues rested on the quality of the guest editors, who included Andy Warhol, Marshal McLuhan, Brian O’Doherty, Jon Hendricks, Dan Graham and Angus MacLise. While these issues are incredibly strong, the contents of the first and final Aspen hold little interest in terms of contemporary artists’ books, and multiples. (For more information on Aspen, see previous posts, here).

Copley's wealth meant that he could avoid the need for advertising (which itself proved tricky for Aspen, whose later issues did away with them altogether), but the decision not to publish art criticism in an art magazine speaks volumes as to Copley’s vision of what a periodical could be.

The New Museum Shop has some of the individual SMS items still available, with prices ranging from $50 to $300, with the Duchamp cover and works by Richard Hamilton, Yoko Ono and La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela selling at the higher end. They are available at the gallery’s website, here.

A friend has generously loaned me the complete set of the stunning periodicals, and I have been documenting the works individually. I'll be posting them sporadically over the next few months, tagged SMS.

Monday, August 24, 2015

The first monograph for LA-based artist Mungo Thomson takes its format from the Time-Life mass-market mail-order books from the sixties and seventies. The "Time" of the title refers to a series of works Thomson began in 2009, using Time Magazine as a starting point. These include a number of drawings of the logo, over-sized mirrors and a video work.

The two-and-a-half-minute video features every cover the periodical has produced, at a rate of 30 per second. It showed in Toronto recently, as part of a group exhibition at G Gallery. The mirrored works take the premise of the novelty mirror which allows the viewer to insert himself onto the cover of the magazine (picture Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, staring into a "Man of the Year" issue in the home of millionaire Jeffrey Lebowski). Thomson produced pairs of these mirrors, oversized (74 x 56 inches) and positioned them across from each other in the gallery, creating a kind of visual infinity as a magazine cover-story.

People is a series of images Thomson has reworked from professional event photographers' pictures of gallery openings. The artist has removed the art from the walls and floors with photoshop, leaving the people behind, seemingly pondering nothing. These images were made into a magazine which mimicked the size, page count and paper stock of the weekly glossy tabloid People. The project was distributed through the mail and exhibited as a take-away. For more information, see previous post, here.

Crickets is a transcription of the sound of a field recording of the insects, notated for a 17-piece classical ensemble. See the previous post, here.

Other works include turning the gallery coat check hangers into wind-chimes, several inflatable projects and a series of large scale photographs of the universe printed in photo-negative (a technique he also applies to Nam June Paik's infamous blank leader Zen for Film, turning the dust and scars on the celluloid into glowing stars).

Throughout the book we see examples of Thomson's appropriation of familiar publication formats: the title itself, People Magazine, National Geographic, religious tracts, and the (admittedly much lesser-known) music scores by Editions Peters. It's one of the more impressive monographs on a young artist that I've seen in the last few years.

The title is available for the special 'exhibition' price of $25 at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, for the rest of this week. The exhibition closes this Sunday, August 30th.

Sunday, August 23, 2015

One of the earliest books on Ono to focus (retrospectively) on a single body of work, this title documents an exhibition of Ono's at George Maciunas' AG Gallery in New York. The title features six illustrations of the works and the text (in both English and Japanese) to the Instruction Paintings: Painting to the See the Skies, Painting for the Wind, Painting in Three Stanzas, Painting to Shake Hands, Painting for Burial, Smoke Painting, Painting to See the Room, Painting to Hammer a Nail, Waterdrop Painting, Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through, Painting To Be Constructed in Your Head (5 versions), Painting Until it Becomes Marble, A + B Painting (2 versions), Portrait of Mary, Painting to Enlarge and See, Painting for a Broken Sewing Machine, and Painting to be Constructed in Your Head.

In the six-page introductory text Ono is quite candid about her first marriages (to composer Toshi Ichiyanagi and later to film producer Tony Cox) and about a brief stay in a clinic during a bout of depression.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

A wooden box, containing 9 silkscreens on cardboards, each 36.5 x 36.5 cm. From a larger series that dates back to the early days of Giorno's career. The first Poem Prints were part of his Dial-A-Poem installation in the Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, 1970.

The texts in this edition are as follows:

"I don't need it. I don't want it and you cheated me out of it"
"That gun's got blood in its hole"
"We gave a party for the gods and the gods all came"
"Sugar, alcohol, meat & cigarettes"
"Nothing recedes like success"
"It's worse than I thought"
"I'm waiting in line with my groceries and I want to get away without incident"
"Life is a killer"
"Put your ear to stone and open your heart to the sky"

A children's book about Mister Blue and his weekly chores written in English in 1963 and translated into German in 1968, featuring illustrations by Dieter Roth, Stefan Wewerka, Björn Roth, Jan Voss, Emil Schult and André Thomkins.

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.